RP Jnr says I've misrepresented his views in the post before last. If so, then I apologise.
I'm still not sure that I understand Roger's views precisely. I think the confusion may be based in the semantics of the terms "fudge" and "fraud" and I want to explore the subject again here.
The original Spiegel article said this:
But what appeared at first glance to be fraud was actually merely a face-saving fudge: Tree-ring data indicates no global warming since the mid-20th century, and therefore contradicts the temperature measurements. The clearly erroneous tree data was thus corrected by the so-called "trick" with the temperature graphs.
The "trick" was of course, to truncate the divergent data, to replace it with the instrumental records for the same period and then to smooth the spliced series so that the join was no longer visible. The sentence is the Spiegel article seems to suggest that this "swap, splice and smooth" process could reasonably be described as a "mere" fudge.
This one sentence raises many objections. Is fudge actually distinct from fraud? Is fudging a trifling thing that can reasonably be tossed aside by attaching it to the word "mere"? And where does the "swap, splice and smooth" technique really fit in among these terms.
My guess is that lay commenters like me have a mental picture of scientific misconduct that encapsulates a whole bunch of transgressions that academics like Roger would treat as distinct. I think I'm right in saying that Roger sees fudging as a lesser transgression, although he is clear that he doesn't approve of this kind of thing. But he also says that in academia, hiding uncertainty is not generally considered as research misconduct. Again, I don't imply that Roger thinks this is acceptable - just the way things are. So if I have it right, in academia fraud and research misconduct are filed under "serious", and fudging and hiding uncertainty are in the "less serious" drawer. I'm just not sure this is how the general public see it. We expect full, plain and true disclosure. Hiding the extent to which you don't know something just gets put in the great big bin called "wrong". And making elaborate steps to hide the fact (swap, splice and smooth) just makes it worse. It certainly dictates against the use of the word "mere", as Spiegel did.
In the comments at Roger's thread, there seems to be much agreement that standards regarding disclosure of uncertainties are rather low in academia but much higher in the commercial world. This raises the intriguing question of how we should judge academic scientists whose work is impinging upon the real world. Should we expect them to have applied "real world" standards of transparency to their own findings? Or must we accept that what will be reported to policymakers by academics will be rife with deception.